mantilla, my pet pin-maker!'

"And taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me
with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir,
I felt as if a bullet had struck me. I didn't know which way to look.
I sat stock-still, like a wooden board. When she had gone into the
factory, I saw the acacia blossom, which had fallen on the ground
between my feet. I don't know what made me do it, but I picked it up,
unseen by any of my comrades, and put it carefully inside my jacket.
That was my first folly.

"Two or three hours later I was still thinking about her, when a
panting, terrified-looking porter rushed into the guard-room. He told
us a woman had been stabbed in the great cigar-room, and that the guard
must be sent in at once. The sergeant told me to take two men, and go
and see to it. I took my two men and went upstairs. Imagine, sir, that
when I got into the room, I found, to begin with, some three hundred
women, stripped to their shifts, or very near it, all of them screaming
and yelling and gesticulating, and making such a row that you couldn't
have heard God's own thunder. On one side of the room one of the women
was lying on the broad of her back, streaming with blood, with an X
newly cut on her face by two strokes of a knife. Opposite the wounded
woman, whom the best-natured of the band were attending, I saw Carmen,
held by five or six of her comrades. The wounded woman was crying out,
'A confessor, a confessor! I'm killed!' Carmen said nothing at all. She
clinched her teeth and rolled her eyes like a chameleon. 'What's this?'
I asked. I had hard work to find out what had happened, for all the
work-girls talked at once. It appeared that the injured girl had boasted
she had money enough in her pocket to buy a donkey at the Triana Market.
'Why,' said Carmen, who had a tongue of her own, 'can't you do with a